How can deep understandings of material properties, limitations and possibilities be used concretely as a resource in the design of embodied experiences? How can material explorations spur and potentially direct, inspire, open up for new technologies and innovations? How can we identify, develop, and polish desirable core mechanics for embodied experiences and what kind of mobile services can be built with these experiences?In this position paper we describe our idea of experiential artifacts, and how we think these can help us open up the design space of the next generation of physically engaging mobile technologies.
In any design process, a medium's properties need to be considered. This is nothing new in design. Still we find that in HCI and interactive systems design the properties of a technology are often glossed over. That is, technologies are black-boxed without much thought given to how their distinctive properties open up design possibilities. In this paper we describe what we call inspirational bits as a way to become more familiar with the design material in HCI, the digital material. We describe inspirational bits as quick and dirty but fully working systems in both hardware and software built with the aim of exposing one or several of the dynamic properties of a digital material. We also show how they provide a means of sharing design knowledge across the members of a multi-disciplined design team.
In low-power wireless networks, nodes need to duty cycle their radio transceivers to achieve a long system lifetime. Counter-intuitively, in such networks broadcast becomes expensive in terms of energy and bandwidth since all neighbors must be woken up to receive broadcast messages. We argue that there is a class of traffic for which broadcast is overkill: periodic redundant transmissions of semi-static information that is already known to all neighbors, such as neighbor and router advertisements. Our experiments show that such traffic can account for as much as 20% of the network power consumption. We argue that this calls for a new communication primitive and present politecast, a communication primitive that allows messages to be sent without explicitly waking neighbors up. We have built two systems based on politecast: a low-power wireless mobile toy and a full-scale low-power wireless network deployment in an art gallery and our experimental results show that politecast can provide up to a four-fold lifetime improvement over broadcast.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.